San Diego among least affordable cities

But region beats other CA coastal areas

San Diego continues to be one of the least-affordable places to own a home in the United States, but it is still one of California’s more affordable coastal metropolitan areas.

That’s according to a third-quarter index released Thursday by the National Association of Home Builders that ranks the top 223 metropolitan statistical regions.

In the third quarter, 28.5 percent of homes sold in San Diego were affordable to households making the median income of $72,300. San Diego’s median home price, according to the index, was $411,000. Only regions around San Francisco and Monterey Bay, New York, San Luis Obispo, Los Angeles and Orange County were less affordable than San Diego.

Alan Gin, economist at the University of San Diego, said coastal California is expensive because people want to live here but there’s a limited supply of land since the ocean serves as a barrier to expansion.

“You’ve got the situation where people are accepting the high cost basically and a lower standard of living because of the desirability of the area,” he said.

Susan Riggs, executive director of the San Diego Housing Federation, noted an aging population that is increasing the demand for housing in the region. She said high construction costs, a state tax setup that discourages residential development and a political climate against high-density building is keeping the cost high.

“When you have an undersupply to begin with, it’s a really difficult hole to dig out of,” she said. “This trend is not sustainable over the long term.”

San Diego has been ranked 203rd least affordable or worse since the second quarter of 2009. The region ranked in about the lower third of metropolitan areas in the mid-2000s before taking the dive during The Great Recession.

“We got hit pretty hard by the downturn, but that doesn’t mean that other areas weren’t hit as well,” Gin said. “Coastal California is just really expensive, so we got hit really hard, but by comparison we were still expensive.”

The most-affordable metropolitan area to live in is Kokomo, Ind., where 96.9 percent of families at the median income of $60,100 can afford the median price of a home, at $95,000.

The San Francisco metropolitan area was the least affordable, where 16 percent of households at the median income of $101,200 would be able to afford the median priced home of $779,000. Gin said the Bay Area’s concentration of technology and biotech companies could be contributing to the higher costs.

Least affordable housing markets

1) San Francisco-San Mateo-Redwood City

2) Santa Cruz-Watsonville

3) Los Angeles-Long Beach-Glendale

4) Santa Ana-Anaheim-Irvine

5) New York-White Plains-Wayne, NY-NJ

6) San Luis Obispo-Paso Robles

7) San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara

8) San Diego-Carlsbad-San Marcos

9) Santa Rosa-Petaluma

10) Napa

Source: National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Opportunity Index, third quarter 2013